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Paneth, Friedrich Adolf

Paneth, Friedrich Adolf
frē´drĭkh ä´dôlf pä´nĕt [key], 1887–1958, Austrian chemist. He was educated at Vienna, Munich, and Glasgow. He held a number of teaching posts in Germany until he was forced into exile in England in 1933. After World War II he returned to Germany as director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry at Mainz. Among Paneth's contributions to the study of radioactivity was the demonstration that lead and radium-D, a product of the radioactive decay of radium, are chemically inseparable, a fact which led him to develop, with Georg von Hevesy, the technique of isotopic labeling (see
isotope
). Their work laid the foundation of modern radioactive tracer techniques.